


where dreams are made of

by thisstableground



Series: less than ninety degrees [25]
Category: Do No Harm (TV), In the Heights - Miranda/Hudes
Genre: Character Study, Idiots in Love, Multi, i have been waiting SO LONG to get to this part oh my god
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-18
Updated: 2020-01-18
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:47:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22306654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisstableground/pseuds/thisstableground
Summary: Vanessa leaves.Vanessa leaves.Vanessa comes home.
Relationships: Ruben Marcado/Usnavi (In the Heights)/Vanessa (In the Heights)
Series: less than ninety degrees [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/713601
Comments: 18
Kudos: 20





	where dreams are made of

The clock keeps ticking, seconds past seconds that Vanessa can’t quite manage to read no matter how long she glares at it. They haven’t done clocks yet in school. She thinks it must have been _hours_ since Mommy went out with her friends, telling her to pack her stuff and wait for her dad to come pick her up.

Everything important has already gone into her backpack: her best t-shirt and her favorite hair scrunchies and the half a bag of chips that she found in one of the lower kitchen cupboards, and her current number one toy, a second-hand plush lion that belonged to one of mommy’s friends kids but he likes trucks now, not lions, so Vanessa got the hand-me-down. She extricates it from its imprisonment, whispering an apology as she smooths out its ruffled fur. “Sorry. It’s probably boring in there, right? I’m bored too. But we’ll be goin' to Daddy’s new apartment soon.”

She hasn’t seen it yet, but Daddy says his new place has _two_ bathrooms, and he says he got a room just for Vanessa to sleep in when she stays so once he settles in she can go see him way more than she could in his old place where she slept on the couch. Vanessa can’t wait. Here with her mom she has her own room but there’s still barely any space for two of them to live in, and all their furniture is old and belonged to someone else first, and even in her own room with the door closed it all smells like stale smoke and makes her feel so sick sometimes that she can’t even eat.

Maybe, she thinks, he might even let her stay longer. Like forever. He works a lot, but so does Mommy, and if Vanessa’s gonna be hanging out by herself all the time anyway, at least she could do it in a prettier house.

The phone rings. Vanessa struggles for a minute to reach it where it’s mounted up high on the wall but eventually manages to knock the handset out of the receiver and then picks it up where it’s dangling from the cord. “Hi.”

“Naomi, I know what you’re going to - “

“Daddy?” Vanessa says, surprised. She thought he’d be in the car right now.

“Vanessa?” her dad says. “Where’s your mom?”

“She went out,” Vanessa says. “Are you gonna be here soon?”

Her dad makes a funny hissing noise and says, “Nessa, listen, I just got a call from my boss, and I really have to stay at work late today. I told him I had to come get you but he says I’m the _only_ one who can help him right now. Can you tell your mom when she gets back that I won’t be able to take you this weekend? And tell her _not_ to call me about it, I don’t need her nagging on top of everything else.”

“Can’t you just come get me tomorrow instead?” she suggests, hopefully.

“The thing is, sweetie, I don’t know if I’ll be finished by then,” he says. “And there's still some stuff I need to fix up in the apartment, so it’s just not a good time right now. It's probably better if we just wait till next month."

Vanessa squeezes her toy lion so tight it makes her arm ache and mumbles, “okay,” then shoves one of its ears in her mouth to chew on because she can feel that she’s about to start crying.

“Next month,” Dad tells her, like he told her last month too. “I promise.”

She hangs up on him.

***

You know a person by the place they live, Vanessa’s always thought. Like how Abuela Claudia’s place is always warm, and smells kind of like hot chocolate, and is full of little remnants of everyone’s kids: Nina’s books, Sonny’s toys, Usnavi’s CDs and clothes and homework and scraps of paper covered with half-written raps. The Rosarios is full of stuff from the dispatch (a bookcase full of file folders spilled over from the office, always some paperwork stacked here or there, some shelf or another with random car parts sitting on it) and full of pride (they still put Nina’s latest report cards up on the fridge, every single time, even now she’s in high school).

Daniela’s place is busy and bustling on first sight, a million trinkets and treasures and tchotchkes all over every surface, every wall, but it isn’t like the happy chaos of the De la Vega apartment or the mismatched rainbow that is Carla’s studio. Everything in Dani’s apartment feels like it’s exactly where it should be, as though every spare space along the wall was only waiting for her to find what was always intended to be there. The one real mess in the middle of all this cluttered order, in fact, is the blanket and the pillow on the sofa, and curled up miserably in the makeshift little nest set up there for her, Vanessa. She clutches tighter onto the now-lukewarm hot water bottle Dani left her with and slouches further into the couch.

The only thing worse, she muses, than being thirteen and getting your first period is being thirteen and getting your first period while you’re crashing on your mom’s friend’s couch because she’s been gone for five days and you don’t know when she’s coming back.

It isn’t like she _asked_ to stay at Dani’s: she just asked her to borrow $10 because the money her mom left her for groceries ran out, and suddenly found herself here. It isn’t like Vanessa is relative or a friend or has any reason for Dani to do her any favors: they might have known each other a long time, but really only because Dani knows her mom from way back. And sure, Dani is being nice to her, in her own no-bullshit exasperated way, but Vanessa just doesn’t know _why._ Dani doesn’t have kids of her own. As far as Vanessa knows she’s never even dated anyone. Her life is the way she likes it already, set up for one person and no room for extras.

 _Now **that’s** the dream_, Vanessa thinks.

When her mom shows back up, after the fighting and the crying and promising that she’ll go to AA meetings and get a new job, it isn’t so much that Vanessa believes things will be any different. It’s that even though Dani tells her “you can stay longer if you want to,” nothing about her so-precise apartment says that she _really_ wants some teenage girl living here indefinitely. This is humiliating enough without Vanessa overstaying her welcome more than she already has.

So she ends up back in her own bedroom, staring at posters and torn out pages of magazines on the wall covering up damp patches and peeling plaster while the train rattles the walls around her _._ She’s tried a million times to make this room into somewhere she likes to be but still nothing about it says that it wants Vanessa to be here _,_ the poorly-hidden neglect and disrepair of this unloved and unwanted apartment of theirs.

***

When Vanessa comes back to shove the last few bits and pieces of her barrio life into a backpack, Mom doesn’t even look up from the couch until she’s about to walk back out, at which point harsh and hoarse she says, “don’t expect me to want you back here when you find out you can’t handle living alone.”

“Don’t worry, I haven’t expected anything from you for years,” Vanessa says. Takes her mom's apartment key off her keychain, leaves it on the table by the door, and walks out. She already said her piece when she broke the news she was moving downtown. If this is the last conversation they ever have, Vanessa isn’t going to shed any tears about it.

She definitely isn’t going to fucking shed any tears about it on the A, even if the heated ache in her eyes is threatening different. Fingernails digging hard into the palm of her hand, she shoves her balled fists in her pockets and then pauses as she feels something she’d forgotten about, small and mostly solid, a little give as she presses it.

It’s the cork from a bottle of champagne. Her second date with Usnavi only a few days ago that feels like a whole year with how much as happened, a day that started off with her thinking that he’d left forever and ended with them both drinking straight from a paper bag-wrapped bottle in Bennett Park.

He still couldn’t open it, but this time had handed it over to her willingly. “You know you still owe me,” she had said as she popped the cork, catching it in her hand before it could fly off and ignoring the fact that she owes him so much, after what he did for her. “I bought this and then I ended up bein' the one moving out. That wasn't our deal.”

“Guess that means we’ll have to have a third date so I can make it up to you?” he’d said, shyly, like she could ever say anything but yes.

Her downtown apartment hits her with a wave of emptiness when she opens the door: a couple trashbags full of clothes, a few boxes, her entire life piled together and leaning against the exposed brickwork wall. There isn’t even a bed yet, only a yoga mat she borrowed from Carla and a sleeping bag borrowed from Dani unrolled in one corner of the room.

She touches the champagne cork again, then takes it out and sets it on the kitchen counter, pulls herself together, and starts unpacking boxes.

***

On slow nights in California, Vanessa thinks wistfully about her studio. She isn’t used to housemates, the feeling of living in someone else’s space, an intruder in someone else’s routine. At night she locks her bedroom door, not because she feels unsafe but only because it reminds her of putting the chain on the apartment door, makes it feel a little more private and a little more like it’s hers, for the short time she’s here.

For the short time they’re here, the boys fill every unfilled part of the small single room. Usnavi flings himself on her bed and tips his entire backpack over it, announces “unpacked!” triumphantly. Ruben asks Vanessa how her shower works, then as he leaves with towel and pajamas folded over one arm he points at the deflated, folded airbed waiting on the floor and instructs Usnavi to set it up while he’s gone.

Vanessa watches Usnavi blow enthusiastically into the valve until he’s bright red and has to wheeze his breath back.

“I think you nearly got it,” she tells him.

He fits the stopper back on and sits on it, a little wiggle like he’s testing it for bounce. There is no bounce: it looks exactly like it did before he started.

“Ruben can finish it,” he decides, then he makes a scrunchy-faced smile at her, says, “man, I forgot how gorgeous you are,” and pats the flat airbed he’s sitting on invitingly. “Come join me, pretty lady.”

She leans off the edge of her bed to give him a pity kiss. “We ain’t doin’ nothing til you clean up, my dude, you have been in a car all day and it shows.”

“Boooo,” he says, and tries to pull her to the floor with him. She puts up the most half-hearted of fights before she rolls off and lands on him.

After Ruben’s finished, Vanessa goes with Usnavi to show him how to jiggle the temperamental temperature dial properly for his own shower. When she comes back to her room, Ruben is towel-drying his hair and looking at the pictures she’s printed off and pinned to the corkboard above her desk, face up only a few inches away while he examines them.

“Vanessa, these are _beautiful_ ,” he says softly, slightly awed.

If she was Usnavi, she’d say, _you’re_ beautiful. Instead she just noses against his neck and can tell that he’s used her shampoo and she says, “you coulda shaved.”

“But it’s my roadtrip beard,” he protests. “Doesn’t it make me look rugged and well traveled?”

“No, it makes you look like a fuzzy teddy bear.”

Ruben giggles and makes a growly noise, hands held up in little claws. He’s so cute it makes her want to tackle him out the window and burn down the whole apartment building. Instead she just pushes him onto the bed, climbs on top of him and kisses him and kisses him until Usnavi comes back in and complains about them having all the fun without him. Ruben says that they could have more fun, if _somebody_ had inflated the airbed like he said. Vanessa says boys, be nice.

Usnavi lies down next to Ruben, and Ruben with his damp hair fanned out on the pillow moves to make space for him, the two of them smiling up at her expectantly, and she thinks, _oh, this is mine_.

***

After the boys leave, her room feels like it’s missing something all the time. She takes the camera that they bought her for her birthday - “well, Ruben mostly bought it,” Usnavi admitted, and Ruben insisted “it’s from us _both equally”_ \- and looks through the pictures from their visit, until eventually she tells herself to get it together and lets the camera hang around her neck on its strap while she goes out seeking snapshots.

Before her downtown apartment, Vanessa had always stepped outside her front door with the same relief that some people find in shrugging off their coats and bolting the door behind them at the end of a long day. For the longest time, home wasn’t the place she could relax and be herself, or at least not the version of herself that she liked to be, the one who walks into a club and everyone shouts, “¡wepa, Vanessa!”

They don’t shout _wepa_ in the clubs here when she goes out with her work friends on the weekends, but she likes to dance there anyway. There are lots of things she likes about living here: there’s the huge bathtub in the hotel suite she stays in with two other women from work when they’re out on a three-day shoot, and the lights flashing at shows and sunlight splashing across the water at the Santa Cruz boardwalk. There’s Nina to drag out to lunch and to the beach and on a little mission through obscure San Francisco streets, trying to remember where it was she ended up going with the boys that had the most perfect bahn mi any of them had ever eaten. Here she has her own camera in her hand, to take wherever she wants and she feels like every picture she takes with it is absolutely perfect, because it’s _hers_.

She slings it round her neck like protective armor when her boss calls her into the office on a Tuesday afternoon, even though their usual review is on a Friday, and taps her finger lightly on the capture button as she takes her seat.

With no preamble, Flora says, “there’ll be a permanent junior assistant position coming up here in August when Mandy leaves. You should apply for it.”

 _“Permanent_?” Vanessa says.

***

Permanent is not a word Vanessa ever thinks about in relation to herself. Never has been. Permanent means unconditional and everything in Vanessa’s life was on condition, was on a loan. All she ever had was the promise of leaving, her whole life getting ready for a train, that waiting game between destinations until it’s time to move onto the next connection. She never thought of Washington Heights as home the way Nina thinks of it as home. She never had an island that felt like hers the way Usnavi thinks of DR as his.

She waits at the station for her train home, and thinks about the way that she says _going home_ but really means _going to the place I’m staying_. If she set up here long-term maybe she could find a new apartment, somewhere cheaper she could live by herself again, another studio.

California gave her so many things she wouldn’t have found staying still, making handprints across the world that say Vanessa Was Here So Fuck You All. But, she wonders, as the train pulls into its stop, would the things she’s enjoyed about being here still be after a year, after a decade? Is it the place she likes, or just who she turned into while she was here?

She has a camera that belongs to her and in her hands it can make whatever she wants permanent. What does forever look like when she pictures it?

***

Vanessa invites herself into Nina’s room, gets into Nina’s bed pulling the quilt right over her head and asks through a layer of blanket, “what made you come back here after you dropped out?”

Nina makes a thoughtful noise as she joins Vanessa under the quilt, lying on her front with her chin propped on one hand. “Well... when it happened, I felt like I couldn’t go back to the Heights until I found a way to fix it. I had to make everyone proud. And when I left here I felt like I could never come back.” She rolls over onto her back, raises both arms in the air so the blanket is a tent high over them. “Then I found a middle ground. It’s easier to live out here now that I know I can go back home and things will still be okay.”

“How do I know where I’m supposed to be?”

“You don’t,” Nina says. “But you have to think about what you’ll definitely regret if you don’t do it, not about what you might regret if you try.”

Vanessa leans her head against Nina’s shoulder and thinks about that, for a very long time. She doesn’t wanna miss out on something good just because she’s scared of it. When has Vanessa ever backed down from a challenge?

“You’re right,” she says, finally.

“So you know what you’re gonna do?”

“I think so.” And then she hates to say it, because the idea makes her so nervous she could scream, but, “and I think...this is something I have to talk to them about in person, isn’t it?”

Nina squeezes her arm around her. “I can drive you to the airport tomorrow.”

***

Usnavi is out when Vanessa lets herself back into her apartment, though his mess is all over the place. Still, it isn’t as bad as it might have been considering she didn’t give him any warning she was coming.

She clears away the coffee mugs and plates and dumps them all in the sink, throws his discarded boxers into the laundry hamper then sits on the bed and looks at the De la Vega family photo that’s been put on the bedside table at some point in her absence. He’s so much like his parents, and like always she thinks about how unfair it is that they loved him so much, that the world couldn’t let one good thing last. She wonders how he felt about moving out of the apartment he’d lived in with them. Was he as sad about it as he was about leaving the store? Was he relieved to leave it all behind? Does he miss it?

It’s strange to see this place, littered with Usnavi on the surface but with everything Vanessa left still waiting underneath it. Most of his stuff is still stacked in boxes in the corner. Her sheets are the ones on the bed. Her furniture, her life that she made. How much work and love and time she put into every inch of this place over the three years she spent here.

It’s been good to her, her little studio. She’ll be sad to let it go.

***

Usnavi comes in whistling to himself. Vanessa pokes her head up over the top of the couch and says, “when’s the last time you swept the damn floor in here?”

He shrieks and drops his keys. “Dios mio, Vanessa, you scared me!” he exclaims, hand over his heart, then “dios mio! _Vanessa!”_ and flings himself onto the sofa next to her, hugging her close. ”You--what the fuck?! You’re here! Why are you here? _How_ are you here?”

“I got a plane, dumbass,” she says. “I...need to talk to you and Ruben about something, and it ain’t the kinda thing you say over Skype.”

Usnavi goes uncharacteristically still and says, “I see...” sitting up properly and tucking his feet up onto the couch. He looks like he might be about to throw up.

“It’s okay,” she reassures him with a squeeze of his hand, even though she feels kind of nauseous herself from nerves. “So, my boss told me that there’s a permanent position out in the Cali branch that I should apply for.”

Usnavi’s eyes go wide and sad, but all he says is, “shit, well, didn’t we tell you you’d fuckin’ kill it?”

“You ain’t upset?” 

“No. I’m proud of you,” he says, and sets his jaw determinedly, despite the tears in his eyes. “I fucked this up the last time, and I don’t think I ever really made it up to you. I ain’t gonna do that again. You take that job, querida, and we’ll be with you all the way.”

She nearly starts crying herself at that: she knows why he reacted badly last time, after all, even if it did hurt. Knows that he hates being left alone as much as she hates being trapped, and hates that she had to test him one last time when she tries real hard not to play games like that any more. But there was never really any doubt that he'd pass.

Usnavi plows ahead before she can get a word in, nervously adding, “and, I don’t- this might be way—it’s just, it ain’t like I got no bodega tying me down here no more, and there’s teaching jobs everywhere that Ruben could get no problem...”

Her heart breaks a tiny bit. Is he really offering what she thinks hes offering? “Usnavi, you love New York.”

“I love _you_ ,” he says, a little desperately. “I’d rather be near you.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I still wanna live here, ain’t it?” she says, and laughs at the sudden aggressive confusion on his face. “I ain’t gonna apply for the job.”

“But...why? I mean, all you ever wanted was to get out of this place. And I thought you was enjoying yourself with the internship?”

“I am! For now. But that don’t mean I wanna stay there forever. I thought about it, and there’s more I want to be doing with what I’ve learned than taking pictures of models. I don’t know what yet, but I’ll find out.” She shrugs. “And yeah, I don’t like the barrio. But Manhattan, downtown, I like living here. Let’s be real, all I _really_ wanted when I was talking about moving out was to get away from my mom. And you already helped me do that.”

He touches her cheek, gives her a melancholy, loving look. “I’m so glad you’re out, he says quietly, then tilts his head at her. “But if you ain’t taking the job then, uh, what did you come here to talk about?”

“Oh, yeah,” she says. “Well. I think we should move in together.”

“...what,” he says.

***

The second Ruben walks in after Usnavi texted him to come over, he takes an immediate step backwards, squints at Vanessa and says, “why are you here?”

“Great to see you too, buddy,” she says.

“It is good to see you,” he says, coming to kiss her in a distractedly stiff way, his internal Only Bad Things Happen meter clearly already on red alert from her unexpected presence. “Are you okay? Has something happened?

“Yes! Something _amazing_ happened!!” Usnavi says, clapping so hard it makes Ruben laugh and give them both a questioning _okay so spill the good news_ look. Vanessa gestures for Usnavi to go ahead. “SOVanessa’sbosswasgongether a job forever but shecomebackhere an’ now we’relivingtogethercanyouBELIEVE that?”

Even Vanessa barely understood that and she was there for the whole conversation. Ruben looks at her for clarification. “I didn’t get any of-- did he say you have a new job?”

“No.” She grins hard to herself. “There’s one goin', and I’m not taking it.”

“Ri-iight?” Ruben twitches his shoulders and says, “can someone just tell me _clearly_ why you’re here? I don’t like these cliffhangers.”

“She asked if we wanna move in together!” Usnavi says, giddy. “And like, yes! Obviously! Because look at her!”

“...Oh,” Ruben says, taking a seat. He looks completely stunned. Vanessa gets how he feels. “ _Wow_. Okay, that—is not what I was expecting to happen tonight.”

“Fuckin’, me neither,” Usnavi agrees. “There was honestly a second there where I thought it might’ve been a breakup convo and I nearly died.”

“I wouldn’t!” Vanessa glares at him. “I would not. C’mon, man, you were willing to move to _California_ for me.”

“You were?” Ruben says, staring at Usnavi. “You were going to leave New York?

“Don’t get it twisted, I am very glad I don’t gotta. It was a moment of insanity." Usnavi shakes his head, then cracks up laughing. “We’re gonna _live_ together!”

Ruben nods tightly, and says, “I- I’m really happy for you. Really. Hey, congratulations!” and suddenly Vanessa’s Google Translate: Ruben to English decodes the forced smile, the way he’s crossed his arms over his chest. Oh, he is so _stupid_ sometimes, swear to god.

She says, “Ruben, I meant all _three_ of us moving in together.”

“Ohh!” he says, bewildered understanding dawning, his fingers flexing into confused little fists and out wide again. “Oh! What _?_ I – yes! I knew— _really?_ I knew that! _What_?”

“Ruben!” Usnavi gasps, reaching over Vanessa to poke accusingly at his arm. “You thought we’d leave you out?! And that I’d just sit here babbling about it like an asshole?”

“Well, you were apparently ready to move out west with her and I assumed-“

“Yeah, but only because I thought you’d come too! _Ruben_!”

“I-I dont know!” Ruben says. “You loved each other before you even knew me, and it took Vanessa this long to even want to move in with you, and I’m...you know. So I thought-“ he shrinks down a little and looks embarrassed when he admits, “I thought you just finally came to your senses, to be honest.”

Vanessa links her arm through his. “You know what I _was_ thinking? When I was deciding whether I want to travel and try new things, or whether I want somewhere to settle down?”

“What?”

“I thought, why should I have to choose one or the other? Why can’t I just have both? It’s worked pretty well before.” She puts her other hand on Usnavi’s knee, then kisses Ruben very gently and tells him, “I already loved him, but I never thought about moving in with him. Not until you came along. I think we woulda just carried on the same way for years.”

“You changed everything for us, hermoso,” Usnavi says.

Ruben pulls at his hair, looking utterly lost. “I...Christ, you can’t just say things like that to me and expect me to know how to answer.”

He falls silent, and Vanessa can see that idiotic overpowered brain of his working through every possible way things could go wrong, every way that the rug could be pulled out from under him again, and realizes she hasn’t come up with a backup plan for what they’ll do if he says that he can’t risk it.

Then he smiles at them, and he says, “can we get a bigger bed?”

***

Usnavi’s about ready to go put down a deposit on the first place up for rent immediately. Ruben says they need a proper plan for their dealbreakers and budgets and ideal situations.

Vanessa, still reeling from it all, reminds them that she still has a whole month left of her internship and that she flies back tomorrow, so maybe for now they should just go get food and not overthink it, and that’s what they do. The air outside is warm and has that faint hot garbage smell, a cab on the street blares its horn loud enough to deafen her and make Ruben jump. Someone shoulder-slams Usnavi in their rush to pass by, and he yells “have a nice day!” after them with sunshiney passive-aggression. They get pizza, New York style a dollar a slice, the skyscrapers reach up tall and fearless into the blue sky above, and Vanessa thinks, _oh_ , _this is_ **_mine_**.

**Author's Note:**

> i mean i attempted a lil bit of a fakeout She's Moving Away Forever thing even though the title and summary probably gave it away but honestly its pointless anyway because did any of you REALLY think i wouldn't have them move in together? and miss out on all the happiness and the 47 different fics i'm going to write about them choosing what colour bedsheets to put on their super king size bed? of COURSE NOT
> 
> please leave a comment if you liked it!


End file.
